Meet the microscopic life in your home -- and on your face | Anne Madden

146,113 views ・ 2017-08-24

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I want you to touch your face.
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Go on.
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What do you feel?
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Soft? Squishy?
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It's you, right? You're feeling you?
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Well, it's not quite true.
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You're actually feeling thousands of microscopic creatures
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that live on our face and fingers.
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You're feeling some of the fungi
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that drifted down from the air ducts today.
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They set off our allergies
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and smell of mildew.
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You're feeling some of the 100 billion bacterial cells
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that live on our skin.
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They've been munching away at your skin oils and replicating,
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producing the smells of body odor.
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You're likely even touching the fecal bacteria
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that sprayed onto you the last time you flushed a toilet,
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or those bacteria that live in our water pipes
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and sprayed onto you with your last shower.
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Sorry.
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(Laughter)
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You're probably even giving a microscopic high five
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to the two species of mites that live on our faces,
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on all of our faces.
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They've spent the night squirming across your face
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and having sex on the bridge of your nose.
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(Laughter)
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Many of them are now leaking their gut contents onto your pores.
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(Laughter)
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Now look at your finger.
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How's it feel? Gross?
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In desperate need of soap or bleach?
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That's how you feel now,
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but it's not going to be how you feel in the future.
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For the last 100 years,
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we've had an adversarial relationship
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with the microscopic life nearest us.
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If I told you there was a bug in your house
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or bacteria in your sink,
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there was a human-devised solution for that,
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a product to eradicate, exterminate,
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disinfect.
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We strive to remove most of the microscopic life in our world now.
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But in doing so, we're ignoring the best source of new technology
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on this planet.
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The last 100 years have featured human solutions to microbial problems,
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but the next 100 years will feature microbial solutions to human problems.
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I'm a scientist, and I work with researchers
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at North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado
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to uncover the microscopic life that is nearest us,
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and that's often in our most intimate and boring environments,
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be it under our couches, in our backyards,
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or in our belly buttons.
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I do this work because it turns out that we know very little
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about the microscopic life that's nearest us.
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As of a few years ago, no scientist could tell you
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what bugs or microorganisms live in your home --
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your home, the place you know better than anywhere else.
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And so I and teams of others
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are armed with Q-tips and tweezers
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and advanced DNA techniques
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to uncover the microscopic life nearest us.
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In doing so, we found over 600 species of bugs
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that live in USA homes,
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everything from spiders and cockroaches
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to tiny mites that cling to feathers.
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And we found over 100,000 species of bacteria and fungi
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that live in our dust bunnies,
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thousands more that live on our clothes or in our showers.
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We've gone further still,
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and we looked at the microorganisms
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that live inside the bodies of each of those bugs in our home.
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In each bug, for example, a wasp,
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we see a microscopic jungle unfold in a petri plate,
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a world of hundreds of vibrant species.
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Behold the biological cosmos!
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So many of the species you're looking at right now
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don't yet have names.
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Most of the life around us remains unknown.
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I remember the first time I discovered and got to name a new species.
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It was a fungus that lives in the nest of a paper wasp.
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It's white and fluffy,
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and I named it "mucor nidicola,"
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meaning in Latin that it lives in the nest of another.
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This is a picture of it growing on a dinosaur,
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because everyone thinks dinosaurs are cool.
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At the time, I was in graduate school,
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and I was so excited that I had found this new life form.
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I called up my dad, and I go,
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"Dad! I just discovered a new microorganism species."
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And he laughed and he goes,
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"That's great. I hope you also discovered a cure for it."
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(Laughter)
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"Cure it."
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Now, my dad is my biggest fan,
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so in that crushing moment where he wanted to kill my new little life form,
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I realized that actually I had failed him,
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both as a daughter and a scientist.
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In my years toiling away in labs and in people's backyards,
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investigating and cataloging the microscopic life around us,
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I'd never made clear my true mission to him.
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My goal is not to find technology
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to kill the new microscopic life around us.
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My goal is to find new technology from this life, that will help save us.
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The diversity of life in our homes is more than a list of 100,000 new species.
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It is 100,000 new sources of solutions to human problems.
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I know it's hard to believe that anything that's so small
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or only has one cell
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can do anything powerful,
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but they can.
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These creatures are microscopic alchemists,
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with the ability to transform their environment
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with an arsenal of chemical tools.
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This means that they can live anywhere on this planet,
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and they can eat whatever food is around them.
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This means they can eat everything from toxic waste to plastic,
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and they can produce waste products like oil and battery power
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and even tiny nuggets of real gold.
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They can transform the inedible into nutritive.
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They can make sugar into alcohol.
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They give chocolate its flavor,
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and soil the power to grow.
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I'm here to tell you
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that the next 100 years will feature these microscopic creatures
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solving more of our problems.
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And we have a lot of problems to choose from.
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We've got the mundane: bad-smelling clothes or bland food.
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And we've got the monumental:
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disease, pollution, war.
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And so this is my mission:
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to not just catalog the microscopic life around us,
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but to find out what it's uniquely well-suited to help us with.
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Here's an example.
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We started with a pest,
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a wasp that lives on many of our homes.
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Inside that wasp, we plucked out a little-known microorganism species
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with a unique ability:
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it could make beer.
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This is a trait that only a few species on this planet have.
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In fact, all commercially produced beer you've ever had
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likely came from one of only three microorganism species.
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Yet our species, it could make a beer that tasted like honey,
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and it could also make a delightfully tart beer.
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In fact, this microorganism species that lives in the belly of a wasp,
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it could make a valuable sour beer
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better than any other species on this planet.
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There are now four species that produce commercial beer.
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Where you used to see a pest,
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now think of tasting your future favorite beer.
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As a second example,
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I worked with researchers to dig in the dirt in people's backyards.
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There, we uncovered a microorganism that could make novel antibiotics,
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antibiotics that can kill the world's worst superbugs.
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This was an awesome thing to find,
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but here's the secret:
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for the last 60 years,
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most of the antibiotics on the market
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have come from similar soil bacteria.
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Every day, you and I and everyone in this room
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and on this planet,
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are saved by similar soil bacteria that produce most of our antibiotics.
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Where you used to see dirt,
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now think of medication.
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Perhaps my favorite example comes from colleagues
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who are studying a pond scum microorganism,
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which is tragically named after the cow dung it was first found in.
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It's pretty unremarkable and would be unworthy of discussion,
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except that the researchers found that if you feed it to mice,
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it vaccinates against PTSD.
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It vaccinates against fear.
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Where you used to see pond scum, now think of hope.
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There are so many more microbial examples
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that I don't have time to talk about today.
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I gave you examples of solutions that came from just three species,
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but imagine what those other 100,000 species in your dust bunnies
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might be able to do.
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In the future, they might be able to make you sexier
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or smarter
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or perhaps live longer.
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So I want you to look at your finger again.
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Think about all those microscopic creatures
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that are unknown.
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Think about in the future what they might be able to do
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or make
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or whose life they might be able to save.
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How does your finger feel right now?
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A little bit powerful?
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That's because you're feeling the future.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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